4 Reasons Why….

Like me, you may have taken a career aptitude or personality assessment at some point in your life. Maybe you didn’t take it seriously or you have forgotten the results completely since then. Maybe you are wondering why you need to take an assessment in your personal or professional life now. Here are the top 4 reasons:

Discover your strengths and weaknesses. Clearly communicating your strengths to a potential employer is an important part of the hiring process, and it’s also important to know once you have that job. If you understand your personality type, knowledge of your strengths and weaknesses will make you a more efficient employee. From a managers perspective, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your employees allows you to place everyone in areas that suit their personalities best.

Increase efficiency in the work environment. Organizations waste millions of dollars attempting to change people who do not have any desire to change. Once you know your strengths and weaknesses, and those of your employees, you are able to work within those parameters. You start to identify their natural work behavior, thus changing someone is not necessary because you provide them with the information needed for everyone to be successful. For example, if you know someone is a high I, you would never put them in the finance department.

Search for and recruit people who fit your business. Most business owners or managers can attest to hiring a candidate who didn’t live up to expectations. The candidate had experience, solid qualifications, and good references. They even performed well at interview, but once they were hired they failed to deliver. Employees who ‘fit’ your business and work environment and ‘fit’ the role they were hired to do will be more engaged and more likely to stay. Measuring the ‘fit’ of potential employees is a key benefit of a personality assessment.

Communicate with your colleagues and supervisors better. Once the perfect candidate is hired for a position and the managers also know their own strengths and weaknesses, creating a cohesive work environment is simple. Communication comes naturally. For example, if you are a high D your natural work behavior is to tell someone what to do. However, if your colleague is a high S, they want to know why they are doing something and need more explanation. Simply changing the manner in which you broach a question will create more successful communication.